Category Archives: Uncategorized

Can, Should, and Will, Part 1: The Venn Diagram

(N.B. — My two posts this week were originally published as columns in Library Journal‘s “Peer to Peer Review” section back in 2013. Thanks very much to LJ for giving permission to republish them here.) I came up with the … Continue reading

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Seeking Out the Lost Sheep

I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I work at Brigham Young University (BYU), the flagship university of the Church’s system of higher education. For the first 32 years of my career as a … Continue reading

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Reflecting on the first year and the future of V&B

Hi, all — Well, it’s been a fun and interesting 14 months or so since I started Vision & Balance in October 2024. I started writing V&B with the idea that it could provide the service of letting other library … Continue reading

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Vision & Balance is on holiday-and-grandbaby break today. Hope you are too. (On break, at least.)

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Eight Things Every Library Leader Needs to Do, Part 8: When in Doubt, Shut up and Listen

Let’s close out this eight-part series on Things Library Leaders Need to Do with an obvious one — but one that requires a bit more unpacking than it may typically get. All of us understand (though not all of us … Continue reading

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Eight Things Every Library Leader Needs to Do, Part 7: Give Credit for the Good, Take Credit for the Bad

When you’re a library dean or director, a certain amount of spotlight will naturally be directed towards you. Being gracious and natural in the spotlight is, therefore, an important skill for library leaders, and I’ll go further and say that … Continue reading

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A Brief Diversion from the “Eight Things” Series

As many Vision & Balance readers know, library leadership isn’t my usual beat — most of my writing and speaking is on the topic of scholarly communication. And while I don’t usually use this platform to discuss those issues, I’m … Continue reading

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Eight Thing Every Library Leader Has to Do, Part 6: Put Patron Morale over Employee Morale

I fully realize that this entry in my eight-part series on what library leaders have to do is going to be a bit controversial — maybe the most controversial of the eight. So I’m going to explain as carefully as … Continue reading

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Eight Things Every Library Leader Has to Do, Part 5: Accept That the Wrong Decision Will Lead to Problems — and So Will the Right One.

The third entry in my “Eight Things Every Library Leader Needs to Do” series is not so much a thing we need to do as a reality we need to accept. Let me explain where I’m coming from on this. It’s a common … Continue reading

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Eight Things Every Library Leader Has to Do, Part 4: Let the Managers Manage

The fourth idea I want to address as an essential task of library leadership is really kind of a non-task: letting managers do the work of management. Now, I realize that this may seem like a trivially obvious prescription – … Continue reading

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